Pricing up & haggling down: value negotiations in the UK charity shop

Fitton, Triona 2022. Pricing up & haggling down: value negotiations in the UK charity shop. JOMEC Journal (17) , pp. 55-78. 10.18573/jomec.231

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Abstract

This article uses a micro-ethnographic approach to investigate the shop-floor presence of ‘professionalisation’ in the UK charity shop sector. Previous literature on charity retail has described how business-like, professionalising practices have invaded their operations (Gregson and Crewe 2003, p. 75). However, these arguments focus upon top-down processes, without observing how these are played out by actors within the physical space of the charity shop itself. A key component of second-hand culture is the variable nature of value within it – and value is all the more unpredictable in a time of global flux. Using the examples of price negotiation and haggling behaviours on the charity shop floor, this study concludes that professionalisation of charity retail is tempered by customer/worker interaction and social imperatives. Thus, charity shops house a hybrid of professionalised and non-professionalised actions and behaviours that demonstrate the value systems and humanity of shop actors. These ‘participant-driven experiences’ of value negotiation enable those on the shop floor to challenge the ‘iron cage’-like characteristics (Weber, 1977) that have infiltrated the 21st century second-hand world: bureaucracy, rationality and impersonality.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	2049-2340
Funders:	ESRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	11 July 2025
Date of Acceptance:	1 October 2022
Last Modified:	11 Jul 2025 12:02
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/179753

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